Three Ernies and a Barn

When my husband and I moved to the country west of Lawrence, Kansas, we bought what remained of a working farm in Kanwaka township. The farmhouse has an assortment of outbuildings; one of the more charming is a stone sheep barn. The barn is not unlike many stock barns in the Midwest; the long axis is oriented east-west, the south side is open, and the north wall is built into a hill. The single-story stone walls are topped with a gable roof covering the hay mow. This barn is particularly clever in the use of the hillside. The grade climbs from one end to the other and terminates at a stone retaining wall that served as a loading dock. A wood and stone fence to funnel the herd to the loading gate is still mostly intact and two pintle hinges for the gates are still set into the stone. There is one square stone set neatly in the middle of the north wall. That stone was certainly laid by someone who took pride in the work.

The barn needed repair when we took possession. It was suffering with cracked and eroded mortar, the gable end siding was rotten, and there was a large elm tree growing against the back wall. Once we were settled, I had the tree removed and invited a contractor friend who lived in the area over. Ernie Fantini and I had met working on the restoration of a stone and brick vernacular house several years before, and I knew he’d be perfect for the job. As we poked at cracks and plucked failing mortar from the joints, we decided how to move forward with the repointing.

The farm was built and owned by the Zeeb family and their descendants for three generations, ending with a grand-daughter, Mabel Damm, and her husband, Ernest. The original four-room stone farmhouse was likely built in the 1860s. Based on the materials and construction it seemed likely the first generation built the three oldest outbuildings: the granary, the shed, and the sheep barn. Mabel and Ernest retired from farming in 1975 when the Army Corps of Engineers took some of their land to build Clinton Reservoir. Ernest died in 1985 and Mabel in 1992. There were two owners between the Damms and us. I thought it serendipitous to have an Ernie working on a barn that another Ernie had owned.

Some years later, I came home on a Saturday to find a carload of strangers spilling out on the drive between the house and the barn. Since there is a gate and mailbox at the end of our quarter-mile long drive, you don’t get down to the house by accident. I admit to giving them a chilly reception, until a woman stepped forward and introduced herself as one of Mabel and Ernest’s daughters. She was amazed the house was still standing; she had thought it destroyed. She related where outbuildings from her childhood were missing. And I asked about the older buildings that remained. She was vague about the origins of the granary and the shed. But the mention of the sheep barn brought a warm smile to her face.

To my surprise, she fondly recalled that a man named Ernie Watts built it about 1950. Everyone who had seen it, including several architectural historians, had thought it much older. But as she related the story, I realized why it had fooled us all. She said Ernie quarried the stone from the southern edge of her parents’ 100-acre farm. He hauled it to the site, shaped it, mixed the mortar, and laid it up himself. She told me how her mom would call him in at lunchtime. And he would amuse her and her sister by kicking his leg up and touching the top of the doorway with his toe when he came inside. He was very tall and thin, and he was African American.

In preservation circles there’s been a lot of talk about underrepresented history and how we fix that. We’ve been looking for systemic reasons, ingrained bias, and questioning how and where to start to tell the whole story of our past. Ernie Watts is never that far from my mind. Walking in my door or looking at the barn I think of him. The first time I went looking for information about Ernie Watts I didn’t have much luck. But recent events had me thinking about Ernie’s untold story and wondering if the tides had turned with the ongoing wave of digitizing historic records. They had.

Ernest Watts was born May 27, 1886, in Lincoln County, Kansas, to William Jefferson Watts (1847-1910) and his wife Elsie (1853-1939). William and Elsie were born enslaved in Kentucky. William’s 1865 enlistment in the 121^st Colored Infantry emancipated him. William and Elsie married in 1868.[i] They moved from Ohio to Salina, Kansas, in 1877 and a year later moved to rural Lincoln County. They claimed 160 acres under the Homestead Act and lived in a dugout and then in a soddy.[ii] They were good farmers, by accounts in local papers. By 1906 William had accumulated enough to build a nine-room stone house for his family.

Lincoln County is part of post rock limestone country in Kansas. This distinctive layer of sedimentary stone is used to great effect on many buildings in the region, but the name is derived from its use as fenceposts on the timber-scarce prairies. It is one of my favorites among the many Kansas limestones. Ernest and several of his brothers engaged in quarrying and building for farmers in the Hanover township area at the turn of the century. In 1898 William Jr. and a cousin were planning to quarry stone for a new bank building in Sylvan Grove. Ernie and his brother John helped build a fence between the Hower and Shellhammer farms in 1907. In 1908 Ernie built a yard wall on the Kasiska farm, and brother Bert was quarrying stone for a new barn on the Hower farm. In 1910 Ernie was back to work on the Kasiska farm repairing a barn.

William Sr. died in 1910, but the family fortunes did not seem to wane. Elsie added to the house and made other improvements to the farm in the years that followed. But then in 1914 she put the farm up for sale and moved, along with many of her children, to Kanwaka township in Douglas County. That is how Ernie Watts came to be in Kanwaka township to build the sheep barn in 1950 with turn-of-the-century techniques that made it seem to be older, and how he came to eat lunches with Mabel and her girls.

Those lunches were six years before Wilt Chamberlain made waves in Lawrence, Kansas – which despite its abolitionist heritage was far from integrated or universally welcoming to blacks. They were four years before the decision in the Brown et al v. Board of Education case that overturned decades of sanctioned segregation in public schools. Those lunches were one year before the young man who had clocked the second fastest quarter mile run in the state was told he wouldn’t run track at the University of Kansas, because he was black. That young man was one of Ernie’s nephews.

Aside from sharing a given name, there were parallels between the lives of Ernest Watts and Ernest Damm. They were born within in a year of each other, to large farming families. Their parents had both been early settlers in Kansas. They both married women nearly twenty years their junior. Like their fathers and many other farmers, they did not rely solely on the farm for income; they took on construction jobs or roadwork to earn extra money, or they hunted coyotes for the bounty on the hides. But Ernie Watts was already a widower in 1950 and he died in 1973, twelve years before Ernie Damm. The Watts family sold land and a home that William and Elsie had worked hard to build, to start over in Kanwaka township, while the Damm family continued with an established farm. The Damm children grew to adulthood and had their own children, while Ernie Watts and his wife May had none. How much of the difference is happenstance, and how much is racial inequality?

As I explored his story, I realized how our lives are interwoven though we never met. It’s not only that Ernie Watts shares a birthday with my husband, that we happened to buy a barn he built, and that he and I share an affinity for stone. I also knew that nephew of his, the one that was denied a spot on the track team, his name was Leonard Monroe. The first time I worked on African American heritage was for St. Luke’s AME Church. I was there to try to help with research for a National Register nomination, and it was the first time in my adult life that I started to see the deep dysfunction and disconnect in racial relations and history. I didn’t know how to handle it then, and I still don’t. Leonard was one of the church members who was involved with that project, and he was always patient and kind with me, even when I blundered. We reconnected briefly, before his death, when I was working on another National Register nomination, for Oak Hill Cemetery. Some of the Monroe family markers were among those unique cultural assets noted in the nomination. As it turns out, Ernie and many of the Watts family are also resting at Oak Hill. And recently my work has taken me to post rock country, Lincoln County in fact, to evaluate a structure built in 1900. Maybe Ernie or one of his brothers was a laborer for that project or helped quarry the stone. Maybe. Maybe I will never know.

What I do know is that it is rare to know the name of the person who built any humble sheep barn in rural Kansas. It is rarer to find a hint of how remarkable, though quiet and uncelebrated, that life was. That singular stone in the north wall of the sheep barn was a signature. That stone is the mark of Ernie Watts.

[i] findagrave.com, William Jefferson Watts (1847-1910), memorial research provided by Lyndon Comstock, accessed 6-15-2020.

[ii] ksgenweb.org, Lincoln County, ethnic groups, “John A. Watts, Early Black Settler Tells His Story,” accessed 6-15-2020.

07/11/2020 Julia Mathias Manglitz, AIA, NCARB